Email this article to a friend

your email

your name

recipient(s) email (comma separated)

message

captcha

Dr. Martin Luther King speaks at the University of Minnesota in 1967 against the Vietnam War, a part of his legacy the Pentagon would like to edit out. (Minnesota Historical Society / Flickr / Creative Commons

Web Only / Features » February 1, 2013

Santa Claus-ifying Martin Luther King, Jr.

When the U.S. military tweets MLK quotes, you know things have gotten bad–for the military.

The U.S. Marines commemorated Martin Luther King Day by tweeting out a famous King line—"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live"—in a not-so-subtle attempt to depict him as a war supporter.

Every year, right around the time between Martin Luther King Day and the beginning of Black History Month, the effort to distort Dr. King's life and legacy seems to intensify. Some years, we see conservatives preposterously assert that if Dr. King were alive today, he would join today's neo-confederate Republican Party. Other years, it is deception via omission—we see replays of Dr. King's 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but do not see any of his speeches about war and poverty.

Princeton professor Cornel West accurately labels all this the “Santa Clausification” of Dr. King, and if you have ever heard or read a snippet of King's 1967 Riverside Church speech, you will understand how apt the label is. You will also understand why this year's most grotesque attempt to Santa Clausify Dr. King's life is at once abhorrent and yet somewhat encouraging.

As The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald first reported, the United States Air Force's Global Strike Command last week posted an online essay saying that Dr. King would cheer on soldiers “ensuring the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. “Further, claimed the Air Force, “maintaining our commitment to our Global Strike team…is a fitting tribute to Dr. King.”

At the same time, the U.S. Marines commemorated Martin Luther King Day by tweeting out a famous King line—”A man who won't die for something is not fit to live”—in a not-so-subtle attempt to depict him as a war supporter. That was a follow-up to a 2011article posted on the Defense Department's website with the headline: “King Might Understand Today’s Wars, Pentagon Lawyer Says.”

That gets us to the special relevance of the Riverside Church speech—the one that the Santa Clausifying Pentagon so obviously wants suppressed.

In that oratory, America's most famous preacher of nonviolence deplored, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” He argued that militarism is not the way to protect America and decried “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” And he insisted that “there is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”

Comparing the Pentagon's historical revisionism with King's words, Greenwald says: “The U.S. military is actually publicly claiming that the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner and steadfast critic of U.S. imperialism would be an admirer of its massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, its global assassination programs, and its covert use of violence in multiple countries around the world, including where no wars are declared. Merely to describe this agitprop is to illustrate its repulsiveness.”

He's absolutely right, but in that repulsiveness there is a promising revelation from a political system in which lies reflect desperation.

In this particular case, the Pentagon's willingness to so boldly lie about Dr. King betrays its desperation to reverse accelerating public opinion trends. Specifically, Pentagon spinmeisters seem to realize that, according to polls, more Americans are raising King-like questions about our government's profligate defense spending and its attempts to preference militarism over other priorities.

This suggests that for all the propaganda attempting to Santa Clausify Dr. King and make us forget what he was all about, we may, in fact, be starting to honor Dr. King's legacy.

That's no excuse for the propaganda, of course—but it is a promising sign that we may actually be closer than ever to realizing Dr. King's dream.

David Sirota, an In These Times senior editor and syndicated columnist, is a staff writer at PandoDaily and a bestselling author whose book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything was released in 2011. Sirota, whose previous books include The Uprising and Hostile Takeover, co-hosts "The Rundown" on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

What I've found especially (numbingly) astounding is the way that even this generation of liberals have censored out Rev. King's powerful message about American poverty. This is astounding because poverty was his driving message. It was also his unifying message; most black people were poor, most of our poor were white, and the critical point was that of understanding what caused this poverty (hint: It's not "bad lifestyle choices" or "lack of personal responsibility"). Rev. King had a powerful social/economic message to America, and even liberals have buried it. What we have left of this great visionary are MLK Day sales at the local Walmart.

Posted by DHFabian on 2013-02-17 14:01:46

The website martinlutherking.org is actually run by white supremacists, believe it or not. The site, a spinoff of the white nationalist Stormfront site, was registered by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black. So that explains that.

Posted by nimh on 2013-02-09 15:29:15

Then it's the fault of leftist liberal progressives for not doing a better job of explaining it to them, for demonstrating in an accessible way how the mindscams work. If we do nothing but blame the US people for their cluelessness, that may be somehow satisfying but does nothing to help change things.

Of course they will spin the MLK image dry, turn him into a sort of black Mt. Rushmore figure, and they will get away with it unless someone figures out an effective way to answer back.

If you want to complain about military spending, why don't you send your article to the heads of state of all the nations involved in intra- or international conflicts from 1968-2013? I'm sure they'd love to hear about how if they would just please stop doing bad things to other people, America and everyone else would be so much better off. Let them know that the U.S. is about to stop defending itself and the rest of the world from terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and war, and so now we'll all be much safer, so everyone can just relax and chill out. After all, America's the country that's creating all those threats to global and national security. Clearly we need to just lay low and be cool, and all our problems will go away... Right?